A Studio Glimpse: The Wilds
photos by Keil Troisi
The Wilds has been a slowly simmering “site-specific” print. More than a decade ago, I came across an old roll of wallpaper with a slightly sprawling floral pattern. It bounced around in my studio for years.
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| George Ferrandi The Wilds (in process), 2020. |
I wanted the printed pattern to interact with and inform whatever image I laid onto it but hadn’t settled on what that image would be. Eventually (like, years later) I cut the roll into the singular, unrepeated sections of the pattern. I laid a transparency on top so I could see the flowers while I sketched the characters, and loved the scale shift that was happening; the presence of the figures turned the wildflowers into jungle trees.
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| George Ferrandi The Wilds (in process), 2020. |
One of the sad-eyed monsters pulls back a petal, giving the sense that the beleaguered creatures are slogging through this unfamiliar landscape, exhausted and demoralized.
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| George Ferrandi The Wilds (detail), 2020. |
The plan was to screen print the image of the outlined monsters, but my printing skills are woefully sub-par and the lines looked dreadful. I finally hand-painted the line work on each print with acrylic many more years later, in fall of 2020 during the pandemic and leading up to the presidential election, when the metaphor reached (please, oh please) its peak resonance. —October 27, 2020.
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| George Ferrandi The Wilds, edition of twelve, 2020. |
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